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Cities don't just spring up ex nihilo. They spring up because of resources, or because of being a convenient place to put a harbor/freight yard/warehousing for the resources, or by being a day's ox- or horse-cart or a fuel tank's drive somewhere between the two. C:S2 doesn't do a particularly good job at dealing with this for a nonexhaustive variety of reasons: - You're stuck with a strictly post-1789 pre-1917 idea of the urban remit in terms of guiding how resources are used; no matter how you zone, there's absolutely nothing short of bulldoze and reroll (and even that's an accuracy stretch) to make sure that i.e. the I and C on Chicken Farm Street entirely convert Livestock into Food and Food into Prepared Food, nor is there any way to encourage say Prepared Food leaving by rail from its inland stretch while only C-finishable and finished goods coming in by ship for the workers to work on or consume downtown. Your depot and harbor will fill up with absolutely everything, including imported garbage, and your roads will clog with trucks shifting these unneeded interstitials between each other on the most absurd routes. - One moderately sized map, neighbors only as amorphous "trade links" means that if anything, you're best completely abandoning an effort to do focused logistics and spreading I on the edge of the map where the pollution goes to Someone Else's Problem Land and an 8-laner every block or two obviates traffic engineering. Sure, there's a spot on your map that is Coal Town, but it probably will not produce enough coal for even a moderately-sized city's needs and even if it did the simulation is as apt to pull from the border as from it. - Also, since neighbors are amorphous trade links and the options aren't even unlocked until well into the game, there's absolutely no driver to be a middleman city of the kind that doesn't have to be concerned with resources other than "the simulation will make you one whether you like it or not". There is no "pick the spot at the mouth of the river, and the rest of the region has to export through you", no "wet your beak on the convergence of ten regional rail lines into a trunk".
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Nov 6, 2023 19:44
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Would be cool to have autogenerated small towns with farming in random terrain to serve as start scenes.
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Nov 6, 2023 19:49
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Vahakyla posted:Would be cool to have autogenerated small towns with farming in random terrain to serve as start scenes. I'm really kind of surprised they don't do this already in the existing maps, or have some pre-built scenarios for you to try. Instead you get started off in a random spot with a highway off-ramp, maybe a small grid, and its on you to start this isolated suburban city. Probably be a more organic and easier start to the game if there was already a few people living scattered around the map, with some job opportunities via industry, maybe a few stores off the highway somewhere to provide some commercial supply, etc.
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Nov 6, 2023 19:54
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Vahakyla posted:Would be cool to have autogenerated small towns with farming in random terrain to serve as start scenes. I could see the desire for both. Many, even most, people probably want a tabula rasa canvas with which to paint their city on. Having an autogenerator also requires you to spend time maintaining it to ensure it doesn't spit out garbage start scenes that crash the economy immediately as you do balance changes. I do think the basic resource extraction industries should probably be unlocked at the start as those, not smog belching factories, make up a lot more of small-town industry you see in the early game.
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Nov 6, 2023 19:57
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Just now downloaded the latest patch on Gamepass, btw
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Nov 6, 2023 20:04
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It'd also give whatever hinting the engine does toward "use this stuff, it's cheap" a chance to shine, and give you a bit of a transit breather as you moved into the midgame (as you'd already have specced high throughput to the borders to move higher quantities of raw materials to support the extractive industries, and less bulky intermediate goods would be replacing it.)
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Nov 6, 2023 20:04
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I built a cargo terminal and ships never take a single ton of goods anywhere, even after I made trade routes, they just dump their poo poo and leave empty. I'm aware of the bug/non-implemented features so lol.
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Nov 6, 2023 20:10
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Nitrousoxide posted:I do think the basic resource extraction industries should probably be unlocked at the start as those, not smog belching factories, make up a lot more of small-town industry you see in the early game. So is gas power plants being available before coal power plants.
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Nov 6, 2023 20:14
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Vahakyla posted:Would be cool to have autogenerated small towns with farming in random terrain to serve as start scenes. I think the only practical way to do this is to have a robust user generated (community mod vetted?) map that you could start from. Possibly with some national parks or something, too, as options.
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Nov 6, 2023 20:48
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I live on a short residential street that halfway along transitions to a mix of city services, light industrial (a clothing factory, laser workshop, and lumber storage with attached workshop) and then to commercial and a small apartment block. In game terms this would be impossible without giving everyone mega lung cancer from the huge smokestacks but the only proximate negative consequence in the real world is occasionally you'll hear a big clatter of noise from the lumber storage, and sometimes you have to wait a couple of minutes for a truck to maneuver around. We could really do with minimally polluting light industry like that.
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Nov 6, 2023 20:53
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MikeC posted:Cities 2 is still very much a city painter where the goal is to solve the traffic problems you created. Even with glitches I still find it a better game than CS1. There’s enough little improvements all around to probably leave its predecessor shelved. My two other pain points, aside from the big one of it being a city painter, is that service building designs and sizes are pretty ridiculous thematically. Making realistic farmland is pretty dire, too. Everything’s so clean at low wealth levels, too. You really cant make busted up ag/rust belt towns. I don’t know why they’re so allergic to that.
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Nov 6, 2023 20:57
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buglord posted:My two other pain points, aside from the big one of it being a city painter, is that service building designs and sizes are pretty ridiculous thematically. Making realistic farmland is pretty dire, too. Everything’s so clean at low wealth levels, too. You really cant make busted up ag/rust belt towns. I don’t know why they’re so allergic to that. I do kinda feel like this is par for the course, to the extent that the starter fire and police are surprisingly good for the genre. (Would absolutely love to be able to place single-tile koban and cisterns, for quick response to small problems that doesn't care about traffic, though.) What are the rest of you doing for specialist industries? It does feel, with the "contiguous box" setup and the very low employment, that they're not actually supposed to be one to two per resource patch. But how small should they go? E: Gas. Stations.      These are four separate areas in a city of 90k. Mandoric fucked around with this message at 22:31 on Nov 6, 2023 |
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Nov 6, 2023 21:17
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buglord posted:Even with glitches I still find it a better game than CS1. There’s enough little improvements all around to probably leave its predecessor shelved. I think the game is less of a painter than CS1 but still a painter and it is by design. A couple of idiots on the PDX forms keep accusing CO of 'lying' and 'faking' the deep sim that was advertised but it is pretty obvious at this point there is a ton of stuff going on under the hood. They have mechanisms in place so that you don't have to care about the stuff under the hood to keep your city going and expanding but for folks like me who want a ton of lvl 5 stuff, there might actually be a lot to offer. I never played CS 1 cities much beyond 60k or so because it felt very repetitive. Plop zones down and place the same standard array of service buildings to max them out and make sure traffic wasn't going to be an issue. CS 2 offers the promise of choice. Service buildings don't level anything up, wealth does. Service buildings are there to just ward off malus penalties and overdoing services might actually be detrimental to that goal. The big issue for me is that it is very difficult from a UI perspective to determine how to fix wealth issues. I can't make informed gameplay decisions if I don't have the information at hand or you make it excessively tedious to find. I personally don't care about dirtying low wealth levels. But that is the challenge of making a city builder, everyone is looking for something different in these games and everyone will have their own pet features they think should be in the game that CO can't possibly accommodate.
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Nov 7, 2023 01:22
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corona familiar posted:if they want to go all-in on simulation they should make both farmland (in the form of arable topsoil) and fresh water depletable at the most "realistic" end They do deplete if you extract faster than their renewal rate. IIRC underground water uses the same mechanic.
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Nov 7, 2023 02:09
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Kyte posted:They do deplete if you extract faster than their renewal rate. IIRC underground water uses the same mechanic. How do you even control the rate at which they extract? The only option I get is drawing the circle around the green area where things grow.
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Nov 7, 2023 02:15
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Jesus, those of you guys on Steam, did you not know hotfix 2 makes Cims shop at industrial sites? Thats why you guys got the explosion in mass transit use. What a cluster gently caress.
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Nov 7, 2023 02:17
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i don't understand why CO made one set of office and low rent buildings that are shared between the finland and NA themes but made separate high density and low density residential sets. the skyscrapers are all interchangeable and half of the EU low density residential buildings look more like north american houses than half of the north american houses
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Nov 7, 2023 02:42
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I gotta say the one thing driving me the most nuts now that I've made peace with most aspects of the game as "I think it'll get better" is the maps. Don't get me wrong, I love vertical elements. I love the challenge of building with the terrain. The loving map named "Sweeping Plains" has more continual, aggressive slopes than San Francisco, a city known for having specifically high hills. The only really flat maps all have some gimmick that don't inspire me. Lakeland looks like a poo poo "turned up water too much on a random map gen" tool. Archipelago has this look to me, too, where it feels way too fantastical and strange. Great highlands gives you two weird mesas which sure, fine, are technically interesting to some, but I feel like will look like absolute poo poo if you try to grade things relatively realistically since you'll have nothing but switchbacks, and why would a city ever form right there? I dunno, I could go on. I just hate them all. I want Waterway Pass to just shift the buildable area to the coast. I want interesting topology but in the first square of Sweeping Plains, if you zone a 12 unit block roughly along the contours, the lots that spawn will be 2-3 stories above/below each other. I don't want to have to fastidiously contour every single lot in a huge loving city, or just abuse God Tools to flatten a shitload of land.
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Nov 7, 2023 06:01
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 This is a block immediately adjacent to the start road in "Sweeping Plains" without any pre-leveling, what are they thinking?
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Nov 7, 2023 06:12
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Anime Store Adventure posted:
this is what i picked too and everything is at 10% in the "plains" the maps all look nice, but the grade insanity makes me feel like they are using maps that were scaled horizontally but not vertically look forward to the map editor.
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Nov 7, 2023 06:23
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Looks like a perfectly normal street in suburban California to me
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Nov 7, 2023 06:26
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Am I missing something with being able to put down road, etc with perfect 0% grade? I need my bridges to be pure and perfectly level! Also is there a way to change a couple road tiles into the asymmetric turn lane and not the entire road segment?
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Nov 7, 2023 06:33
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Anime Store Adventure posted:
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Nov 7, 2023 06:35
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Tarezax posted:Looks like a perfectly normal street in suburban California to me I guess, but the problem is that the slopes are so aggressive and more notably continual that leveling for neighborhoods means you're either constantly at 10% grade block to block from end of the city to another, or you have to have huge blocks of steep slope with nothing that's nothing but grade change and no zoning or you get cliff houses. I'm currently building on "Twin Mountains" which is a river ending in a coastline. Sloping to the coast is basically 1:1 zoneable area to grade if I don't want to absolutely abuse the terrain. Maybe I should be complaining that the way lots flatten weirdly is what creates the issue, it loving sucks. That's 4 lots to go about a floor, as opposed to this which is supposedly their "plains" map going about 2.5 stories in 1. Maybe a bad picture on my part, I'm looking more at the background buildings but sent an angle with more gentle grade in the foreground. I thought it showed off how steep it is better. Anime Store Adventure fucked around with this message at 06:39 on Nov 7, 2023 |
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Nov 7, 2023 06:37
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Anime Store Adventure posted:I guess, but the problem is that the slopes are so aggressive and more notably continual that leveling for neighborhoods means you're either constantly at 10% grade block to block from end of the city to another, or you have to have huge blocks of steep slope with nothing that's nothing but grade change and no zoning or you get cliff houses. I'm currently building on "Twin Mountains" which is a river ending in a coastline. Sloping to the coast is basically 1:1 zoneable area to grade if I don't want to absolutely abuse the terrain. there are no two story homes in that neighborhood, those garages lead into a basement. it's around four floors. the maps do suck though. im pretty sure that the terrain is mostly taken from the USGS's DEMs because they've got some of the same weird artifacting going on if you look at the heightmaps via the dev console
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Nov 7, 2023 06:42
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I mean ultimately maybe my complaint is misguided, I don't know. I just know that its loving hell to make *anything* look good because it feels like you *have* to terrace any of the current maps and pre-level lots so poo poo doesn't get wonky, and doing that means you just have endless steps all over. Maybe I just need to adjust to Skylines, but I feel like it should feel more natural. Coming off of W&R I build on poo poo like this as a matter of personal preference and somehow in that janky game that absolutely needs level terrain poo poo ends up looking better than this game that ostensibly tries to blend lots on a slope. E:  Like, the houses on the right here look good, but that's already a 10% grade, and I included on the left there what I had to do to get to that grade. Unless I want my entire city to follow a 10% grade and leave a bunch of space in between blocks, this is the best I can do. Maybe its just a Skill Issue but it stinks. Anime Store Adventure fucked around with this message at 06:50 on Nov 7, 2023 |
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Nov 7, 2023 06:44
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Archduke Frantz Fanon posted:this is what i picked too and everything is at 10% in the "plains" This. The only flat map is probably Tampere, you can buy the preorder key dlc for 1€ though. But then Tampere has the most insane hurricane winds..
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Nov 7, 2023 07:37
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piratepilates posted:Same, Victoria 3 and CS2 have made me weary (despite me playing both of them anyway like a rube). Lamplighters League was a complete write-off too. They had a lot of leeway when they were a smaller publisher, but I think people are running out of patience for Paradox's tendencies. If it makes you feel any better, Victoria 1 was way worse. CO also had some uneven launches with Cities in Motion, the predecessor series to Skylines.
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Nov 7, 2023 09:10
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKonh1bjDnk You can unlock the map and asset editor now.
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Nov 7, 2023 09:15
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houses on really steep lots would look fine if anything about CS2 was designed with this idea in mind. I lived in a house growing up where half the "basement" was actually above-ground: the assets just need to have the idea that part of the foundation can be exposed. they already sculpt the terrain for a lot to match the building - just by leveling it instead of having any kind of slope on the lot itself. this is extremely Not Uncommon in rural/suburban America, even in states you'd assume are flat - this picture is from Northwest Indiana. Indiana isn't the flattest state in the U.S. but the northern part of it isn't exactly hill country or w/e. this applies to pretty much any kind of building, really - this is a tower I pass by on my way through Chicago sometimes:  the "ground floor" is, depending on what street you're on, either about level with the road or about a floor above it this is (for people who don't know where Chicago is) northeastern Illinois - one of the flattest states in the United States (although not as extreme as Florida). it would be really cool if CS2 handled stuff like this so that pedestrian paths on lots could naturally change elevation, especially since pedestrian transit seems to be much more mechanically interesting in CS2.
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Nov 7, 2023 09:17
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death cob for cutie posted:the assets just need to have the idea that part of the foundation can be exposed. they already sculpt the terrain for a lot to match the building - just by leveling it instead of having any kind of slope on the lot itself. this is extremely Not Uncommon in rural/suburban America, even in states you'd assume are flat - this picture is from Northwest Indiana. Indiana isn't the flattest state in the U.S. but the northern part of it isn't exactly hill country or w/e. Having actual foundations auto-level buildings with the surrounding terrain somehow would be a great change compared to "oh hey player plopped down a service building / a new piece of zoning is being constructed, let's dig a straight hole in the terrain for it" which is what happens 90% of the time (the other 10% being "hope you like non-euclidean geometries. Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn!") - that's incredibly jarring. Getting a second city off the ground and I really like this game. I find it both easier and more complex than CS:1 and I believe when they'll get around to fixing the simulation it could have a ton of potential, much more than CS1 which got kinda boring much quicker (for me), even with dlc TorakFade fucked around with this message at 09:42 on Nov 7, 2023 |
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Nov 7, 2023 09:39
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Don't sleep on trams ya'll. I'd ignored them for a bit but tonight I spent time experimenting with them and I genuinely think they may be the best public transport for super dense cities now that I understand some of the weird poo poo they do. -Elevated trams above Medium 4 lanes @ 10m work well but will have oddities forming four way intersections. -Large 6 lane roads make it super easy to form four way elevated tram intersections. -Don't place tracks directly at road level if you can avoid it. I was using trams like street cars because I didn't realize they could elevate directly above existing roads. -If you're having trouble placing elevated track 90% of the time I've been able to resolve the conflict by raising the tram another 5m or carefully placing each section before the road below hits an intersection or turn. -You can stick elevated tram pillars in the middle of intersection round abouts. (Probably have to have round abouts for this) -Trams can descend from 10m to 0m in a surprisingly short distance which makes it pretty easy to jam stops in just about any where. - You can put tram stops in the air and provide ramps up to them which will make adding stops even easier. -Snapping prevents being able to place trams as often as it helps I keep it off unless I want a specific snap type for the tram track. -Specialized industry area gently caress with tram placement, move the area back place the track then replace the area -Elevated tracks can be placed over the top of elevated roads but you need to set the elevation to the elevation of the road below + what ever elevation value you want for the track. The support pillars will also connect to the ground not the road below. It's confusing until you try it. -Trams can make tighter turns than you'd expect. I don't know the max but it's some where between 90 and 120 degrees. -With tram tracks selected and the replace mode active you can paint track onto existing streets. This might be useful with divided roads? It sucks otherwise because the trams conflict with cars and are subject to their traffic jams. -If you can't bulldoze a track because of "Overlapping items" it's because the track is longer or shorter than the road it's on top of and the seems over lap each other which makes it one big road/track blob. You have to take the whole thing apart if this happens. I avoid this by trying to match the length of road section and track section where I can -Trams might make a near carless city a realistic goal Example of a raised stops.   Why you shouldn't put tracks at street level.  Raised tracks function as sidewalks too? Not sure if bug.  Trams are about 7 times more dense than cars  Well... poo poo this has applications  Hive cities seeming more possible 
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Nov 7, 2023 10:17
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I have a small tram network at ground level but you're making me think I should definitely consider redoing it elevated. If you can connect with ped paths then it's definitely viable almost anywhere. Game still desperately needs small train stations, possibly the single most insane decision they made was only having the single big one, even though the game had to be rushed out the door that seems like something that should have been planned out and included long before that point.
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Nov 7, 2023 10:25
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Ms Adequate posted:I have a small tram network at ground level but you're making me think I should definitely consider redoing it elevated. If you can connect with ped paths then it's definitely viable almost anywhere. Once I worked out how to use elevated trams and that they existed at all I ripped out all the street level tracks, all the stops, and redid all my routes. Trains also kind of make more sense to me now too, it feel better using them for large volume long range transport with trams covering local trips now.
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Nov 7, 2023 10:29
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No elevated train station is a sin Even as a "city painter" its missing a lot of stuff - why doesn't the terraform option have a surface painter? Can't make beaches or non-grassy plains. Can't remove or add water (eg: making lakes requires you to dig a channel and let it fill, then close it) Fishstick fucked around with this message at 10:39 on Nov 7, 2023 |
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Nov 7, 2023 10:34
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Ms Adequate posted:I have a small tram network at ground level but you're making me think I should definitely consider redoing it elevated. If you can connect with ped paths then it's definitely viable almost anywhere. You can use pathways to make elevated stops. I just tried it.
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Nov 7, 2023 10:43
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Anime Store Adventure posted:I gotta say the one thing driving me the most nuts now that I've made peace with most aspects of the game as "I think it'll get better" is the maps. Don't get me wrong, I love vertical elements. I love the challenge of building with the terrain. I play on barrier island for this reason, it has a few rolling hills but the majority of the island you start on is flat
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Nov 7, 2023 11:03
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Barrier Island is my preferred map as well. I did go pretty heavy on flattening the main island since its going to be my urban core, but everything on the mainland is being left as is with only leveling plots when running up some of the bigger hills. Its a pretty good map.
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Nov 7, 2023 13:02
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Ostrava posted:You can use pathways to make elevated stops. I just tried it. How do you hook up the pathway and the tram tracks? They don't seem to want to connect.
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Nov 7, 2023 13:07
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Turk posted:How do you hook up the pathway and the tram tracks? They don't seem to want to connect. The best method I've found so far is to work in this order: Roads Tracks Tram stop Pathways built from low to high
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Nov 7, 2023 13:12
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